Ok. Maybe I have to capitulate and introduce the classes after all.

Classes can be done a lot of different ways, but I was actually going with the level approach.

Actually, I feel that a lot of the modern games still has levels in a kind of "fuzzy level" approach. Any game where you get points to spend on your character development after completing an adventure where the development isn't explicitly tied to the skills used during the adventure has this approach.

Only the clear "you advance on what you used" or hybrids with that and "you get extra experience to put on any skill to simulate that you might have used skills 'off-screen'" wouldn't belong to at least the "fuzzy level" thing.

Take a look at Shadowrun where you collect karma and buy increases in any skill. You could easily make Shadowrun into a level system by awarding experience instead of karma and then at increasing a level you get a bunch of karma to buy stuff for.

What the level system does is to make the increases discrete, whereas the currently popular "buy improvment with experience" guarantees possible increases after every session.

The advantage of the latter is of course that you don't get discrete jumps in your ability. This increases the SMC (Setting to Mechanics consistency) of the game which usually is a good thing.

The advantage of the level system is that you don't have to limit yourself to skill improvements. You can have other things change in an orderly and balanced fashion. The level system lets you calculate how powerful a character could possibly be simply through a glance. It's a useful tool to interface with other meta game mechanics too.

Anyway, I was thinking of a level system for Ygg. As Earthdawn shows, and there are probably other examples as well, you can have a level system side by side with skills and "fuzzy level" mechanics.

Originally, when I still had plans to have a standard skill system for Ygg, I was thinking of have it parallell to a "hero level" which only affected meta game mechanics such as fate points. I cut away the skill system from Ygg though. It didn't seem necessary. Too much junk.

But, I wasn't going to go AD&D on you. AD&D (at least the versions I played) have two specific things I wasn't gonna have in Ygg's system:

1. Kill XP. Look at Palladium. Palladium got XP right.

2. Progressively more time between levels. In AD&D (and Palladium as well) you need more and more XP to increase a level. I don't want that.

So what does that leave us?

Pretty much almost like a "fuzzy level" system. Only with a level label written on it.

Quick rules:

1. Start at level 1. Every 1000 XP (or 500 XP), it's supposed to be between a normal session and two sessions worth of XP.

2. Every time you gain a level you do the level up stuff which is increasing abilities and so on yadda yadda.

Yes, this means that after a 100 adventures the character is at level 100.

How is that helpful? Why not go along with the "fuzzy level" approach?

Well, as I said, it's a helpful value to input into the meta mechanics.

Let's say we have Fate points. Then maybe at level 1 you have 1.
Level 3 you have 2. Level 9 you have 3. Level 27 you have 4. Or whatever numerical series I feel like using.

Anyway, it works better than having the players buy them at increasing cost or something like that.

(Of course, I could have made level 3 into level 2, level 9 into level 4 and so on and I'd have a standard progressively slower increase in abilities just like say AD&D. But that's not really what I want. I want fuzzy levels with a Level label put on top. Earthdawn has another scheme for doing the same thing, but it's friggin complicated. This has pretty much the same effect as ED's system but it's much much simpler)

Unfortunately, not having increasingly costly level increases has a bad side-effect. You see it already in the fate point thing. Although it might be permissible if it's just about meta-resources, if you want to use this level as a way to limit skills aquirements you run into problems.

Or maybe it's just me who thinks seeing a list saying "You need to be level 347 to buy this skill" feels a little silly? It would have been a different thing if every level would have given access to a new skill or something. Of course I could use the base 10 and every 10 levels you get new skill/talent/feat choices. But even that sucks. You get this "jump" in progress you don't really want. Right?

As far as I can tell, the only good way out would be to put in the limits in the talents/feats/skills themselves, demanding that "you need to have x in talent y before you can learn this". Ok in theory but I dread the task of balancing that.

Do I have any alternatives?

Pale Fire wrote: Do I have any alternatives?

As I've been reading these recent Ygg threads, I've been contemplating the problem of character advancement, which seems to be a common issue underlying all these topics (classes, levels, abilities, specialization vs. generalism, etc.). Weighing heavily in my thoughts have been the following:

- Few characters, in the fantasy literature that Ygg is intended to invoke the spirit of, "advance" in any significant way.

- As Mike just laid out, adequate justification for advancement is rare in role playing games. The reason is simple. Realistic training for skill improvement, even off camera, is tedious and isn't any part of what you term "standard fantasy."

- The exceptions in the literature are, in the vast majority of cases, young characters of unknown (but often great) potential.

Focusing in on those exceptions, we see occasional stories that attempt to depict the young character being trained. But even in those cases, the character usually progresses through training extraordinary quickly. Either that, or the training fails but then the character comes into his or her own by responding to a crisis. (Luke Skywalker exhibits both phenomena in succession, in Episodes IV and V) The impression is always that natural "gifts" or innate talents are being revealed, rather than being created through tedious training. This is true whether or not the abilities have any overtly supernatural quality.

I believe this aspect of the literature arises from two sources: as a metaphor for the changes and discoveries of adolescence, and the nearly universal pleasurable fantasy of being able to get things without working hard for them. (It's the same reason sports writers like to pretend that the latest "young phenom quarterback" in the NFL just woke up one day and discovered he had a great passing arm -- hey, maybe the same thing could happen to me tomorrow -- instead of acknowledging that the guy spent all his time for the past ten years, through high school, college, and training squads, practicing.)

So, you want Ygg to better evoke the literature, and solve some of these otherwise intractable design problems at the same time? Then have two kinds of characters. For convenience I'll call them "adults" and "adolescents" but you'll need more colorful terms.

Adults are fully accomplished in their abilities. (They may or may not have yet begun applying those abilities in any dramatic way -- that is, they may or may not yet have reputations or have already done heroic deeds.) Adult characters do not advance. At least, not in any "systematic" way; a spellcaster might still discover a new spell or a warrior might encounter and learn a new technique or a character might learn to swim during play, but these would be occasional and haphazard occurrences driven by the turn of events, not the post hoc rationales for an advancement system.

Adolescents start out as "low level" characters and they advance. This advancement can be as dramatic as in D&D, but it's interpreted as the realization of their existing potential or the revealing of their natural gifts, which can eventually exceed those of the adult characters. It does not come about through training (though training can be depicted occasionally for color) nor from ordinary use of abilities. It happens as a result of crises survived. In the system this occurrence could be related to the use of Fate Points. Adolescent characters define a large portion of their "potential" at character creation, which gives the characters a direction for advancement and prevents them from developing into generalists. The advancent is also always uncertain (as is, of course, the survival of the character). After all, gifted and "fated" characters in fiction are often fated to die young while using their gifts to achieve a crucial end, rather than fated to become successful and powerful. ("Now I know why I was cursed with such great strength. It was to be able to hold this collapsing tunnel up for just long enough for the rest of you to escape.")

This is decidedly and purposefully unbalanced between adult and adolescent characters. (The lack of this unbalance in fantasy novels written based on traditional RPG "parties" is one reason they come across so flat.)

Niche protection and protagonism are an issue. Adolescent characters mixed with adults will have generally inferior abilities, with the exception of maybe a precocious wild talent or two. But I'd also give the adolescent characters way more Fate Points than the adults, as well as individual situational advantages. In general, setting up this imbalance in Ygg would force you to consider ways of protagonizing characters other than abilities, the importance of which Mike pointed out. See this recent thread for a discussion of one case of trading off between direct effectiveness and another aspect of a character’s situation.

This requires some development to thrash out the next level of detail, but on the surface it appears to solve most of the recently discussed Ygg problems. Abilities and balance for adult characters are made easier because they don't advance. Advancement for adolescent characters is guided in large part by their pre-established "potentials," so those have direction and specialization. Balance for adolescent characters is nonexistent, so you don't have to worry about the system maintaining it. There are no EPs, no counting of levels, no fixed milestones. Advancement is situational, and it's based on the kind of situations you want to have a lot of in play (adventurous crises) rather than on ones you don’t (training sessions).

Played with a mixture of adult and adolescent characters, this strikes me as much more evocative of the Lord Of The Rings - Dune - Star Wars fantasy fiction vein (and therefore, of certain mythologies and heroic traditions as well) than most of what I've seen in RPGs. If I were playing a game with a system like this, it would be a difficult decision for me whether to play an adult or an adolescent -- which I believe is a good sign.

- Walt

Walt, excellent notes.

Only one problem, however. I'll head PF off at the pass, here. He's going to say that Standard Fantasy relates to how gamers percieve things. IOW, Standard Fantasy is D&D. Which means that they expect advancement.

Betcha two to one, Christoff comes back and says that what you propose is too radical, and that he must have a more standard "advancement" system in his game.

Mike

Hey Mike. Give the man some credit. He's had a lot of pretty good and fairly novel ideas. His biggest problem is simply picking one to test in an actual game. I wouldn't be so quick to put words in his mouth.

Mike: I'm not taking that bet. :)

Walt,
It seems to me that characthers DO advance in Fantasy.
It's just that they usually need to be trained to start off. Luke needes Obi-wan to teach him how to use the force and a light saber, but once he knows he gets better on his own. Earthdawn sorta does this. You can advance a power(talent) on your own,but you need to train with someone to learn new ones.
You could always do a more 'meta' advancement also. Charachters get experiance, but they don't spend it on improving themseveles, but instead spend it on other things.
The advancement==connectedness comes to mind. An 'adult' might better equipment or a patron or a follower with their Fate points, rather than actually getting stronger or more skilled.

Another way to do with would be to have an explicit 'non-adventuring' system. Ars Magica goes this very well, with explicit and fairly simple rules for how charachters can spend non-adventuring time training or doing research. Also, it used large scale discreet time of a 'season'. Honestly, I think discreet time helps a system like this alot, as the book keeping gets easier. I think you could do this with fantasy also, although I'd go by 'month' rather than season. You adventure one month and mabye train the next.

You could always limit levels to 10 or less and simply make them worth more to achieve. I use a skill system with only four degrees (e.g., 'levels') of achievement for any skill with the 4th level being master level and that grants a hefty dose of author stance power to the player whenever their character uses that skill.

As to gaining levels, I follow the fuzzy "if you use it enough" it can increase. But better yet, how about failure? People do learn from mistakes. I wrote up a little rule about this whereby the player may simply change their character's so-called 'critical-success' into a stupendous failure as a means of possibly learning from the whiff.

So maybe failure could be looked at and made into some kind of dice mechanic for advancement?

If Christoffer decides as Mike anticipates, I'll assume it's because he's right, in the context of his own goals and target audience. Either way he has my thanks for letting me use his game design in progress as a platform for airing out some ideas. I've already seen these Ygg threads pointed to as an ongoing design case study. The variety of opinions we contribute here serve a useful purpose in that context, regardless of which ones are adopted in the Ygg design.

That said, I imagine Mike and I probably share some of the same personal reservations about the generally conservative trend of Ygg system design decisions so far. (And that's speaking as one who likes D&D-like systems and plays them often.) I've so far failed to grasp Christoffer's vision for how he plans to give Ygg the distinctive feel he intends. It appears to me that he has so far failed to fully grasp the utility of system in helping to create such a distinctive feel (applying the System Does Matter postulate). But I could be wrong.

Damion, I agree that some characters do advance in fantsay fiction. However, my point is that most of that advancement is associated with specific characters of specific types and is usually unrelated to realistic amounts of training or practice. Luke Skywalker is a perfect representative of what I called the "adolescent" character types who advance this way. (Note that "adolescent" is not intended to be a precise description of the character's actual age or temperament.) Obi-Wan "trains" Luke for at most a few hours or days aboard the Falcon (however long the flight to Alderaan is supposed to take). This has no similarity to spending months or seasons at a time in training, and doing so over and over again. Yoda's training of Luke is at most a few weeks (the time it takes for Vader to arrive at Cloud City after Han and Leia arrive, which doesn't seem to be more than a few days but I guess could be a little longer). And that training is unsuccessful. We know now that Jedi training is normally fifteen years or so. Luke isn't just a would-be Jedi, but also a certain type of fantasy protagonist. Those rules don't apply to him.

In the same series Han, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando, and Darth Vader don't advance, at least not in terms of increased personal abilities. (Your point about substituting other kinds of advancement is well taken. I completely agree and should have made that clearer in my post. I linked the same advancement=connectedness thread you referred to, for the same reason.) Nor do the majority of fantasy protagonists including Conan, Elric, Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, Cugel the Clever, and even many young naive characters like Mouse in Ladyhawke, or Frodo. (Compare Merry and Pippin, who are the only advancing "adolescent" type characters in LoTR. Do they train? No, they drink ent-water and then jump into battle.)

What I see happening over and over in fantasy fiction (and many other semi-fantasy genres -- especially sports fiction) might be described as "advancement in the middle:"

1. Character is about to fail at an ability, or confronts a test of an ability that appears beyond capability.

2. Character invokes applicable TRoS style SAs either to make a final greater effort, or (usually in the case of supernatural abilities) have an inspiration that suddenly makes the task seem doable.

3. If step #2 is successful, the action succeeds, AND the character will now perform that feat at a higher level of effectiveness in the future.

Badda bing, make step 2 a fortune roll and there's your system. And I don't see any reason a system incoporating that mechanism would need any other mechanism for ability advancement. If you must include rigorous practice or training, make the effect of that be a modifier on the roll in step 2. So a character can re-enact the training montage from a Rocky movie if you want ("If we hear any inspirational power chords, just sit down until it goes away" -- Giles, in Buffy: The Musical), but you don't see the effects until the chips are down in the ring.

- Walt

JSDiamond you just said the magic words: Failure-based advancement.

This is something I've been kicking around for a while now. I am contemplating a system wherein XP's are awarded ONLY for Serious or Critical Failure.

********Warning: The following mechanic is unapologetically GAMIST *******

It uses a Trait + Skill + 2d10 (versus Target Number) mechanic for task resolution (including combat). If you roll between -1 and -4 (relative to Target #), it's a Failure (whiff or Stymie). Between -5 and -8, and it's a Serious Failure (Something Bad happens). Less than -9 and it's a Critical Failure (Really Bad, potentially fatal?).

You get 1 XP for a Serious Failure and 3 XP's for a Crit Failure. The XP's can only be used to advanced the skill for which they were earned.

The reason I've gone into detail above is to point out a key (IMO) necessity of failure-based XP award. Namely, the more difficult the task is (for a given character), the greater the chance for a serious failure (and thus an XP award). The "natural 20 = Crit Fail" mechanic is too arbitrary & capricious and does not properly reward/punish excessive risk-taking.

Here's what I like about the Failure = XP's mechanic:

- Unlike similar systems that reward _success_, this system discourages the practice of attempting extraneous easy tasks merely to get a chance to earn xp's. (I know a good GM will guard against this, but having it built into the system is better, IMHO).

- It automatically rewards PC's (of ALL levels) for attempting challenging tasks. PC's who take on more challenging situations (and the lumps that go with them) progress faster than timid PCs. This seems very believable and intuitively correct.

- The GM does not have to figure out how many XP's a particular opponent or situation or play session was worth. He'd just try to make the opponents & situations challenging but not impossible - which he should be doing anyway, right? The XP's would come automatically.

- Failure Mitigation: "Oops, you fell off the castle wall and busted your arm. Oh, and your cry of pain alerts the castle guards. But hey, at least you get 3 experience points"

- It is inherently ADAPTIVE; if the players keep coming up against hard situations that land them on their asses, they will quickly grow stronger and more capable. Soon these difficult tasks will become much easier for them.

The potential problems:

- Some people think it's too illogical on its face. "You don't learn by screwing up!" They want to reward success too, but this completely short-circuits the desired effect.

- Skills will probably have to be "normalized" so that those skills which are used less frequently by their nature are "cheaper" in XP's. (eg combat involves more rolls than, say, a protracted magic ritual.)

- (this is the tricky one) Ideally, the undesirable consequences of failure in any given instance should *just* outweigh the benefit of the XP award. This is so that characters don't go abuse the system by looking for excuses to screw up merely to gain XP's. Of course, the GM will also prohibit this kind of abuse outright, but the character should pay a fair price for bad luck/bad judgement and its associated lessons. Kinda hard to strike this perfect balance all the time, though?

Anyhow, condolences for the long post but I thought I'd chime in since someone mentioned failure-based advancement.

Walt,
I think we agree, we're just comming at it in different ways. My point was that fantasy characthers tend to train once and just get better from then without really training again. I.e. no levels.
Luke get's trained and is pretty incompetent with a lightsaber when Vader cuts off his hand. But then later he's a wirling dervish of death on Jabba's barge. He got better, but no-one trained him.

I'm not quite sure movies like Star Wars are the best place to look for a model. A movie is scripted, thus it always works, while a game should remain consistent in a wide variety of situations that cannot be perfectly forseen. Star Wars would have been ruined if say Vader got better and kicked Luke's rear all over the death star, because both of them advanced, but Vader started out better.

Robert, how did the failure based traing work in practice? Like you mentioned, it seems a hard balance to strike.

I would suggest a hybrid system between the the two already mentioned.

I would suggest that players earn experiance as normal, but they can spend these experiance to advance whenever they fail at something. If you fail, you can raise your skill and try again. This would give the 'Someone always has just the right skill effect you often see.' Then you make up a justification for it. For combat skills this would probably be 'I'm losing! Must try harder!'
This gives the effect you see in fantasy where fighters appear to become more skilled mid-battle. 'I have a secret. What? I'm not left handed.' Also, this means GM's don't have to tailor adventures to the charachters skills as much. If you find an old tablet, possibly someone could buy a level in that ancient language. 'I remember seeing this somewhere before...' and they can read some of it.

I would suggest having increasing skill costs, maybe a limit on how many times it can be done for a given skill per scene and a GM veto of course, but only for rare situations.

I'm gonna give a more complete reply later, but just a few quick lines for right now:

Mike: CP & Level usually both drop the requirement that the skills worked on should be the same as skills actually worked on within the adventures themselves. Level can be considered a variant of CP, kind of a "packaged CP" model. That's what I'm thinking of when I say that they're alike. If each level increase is sufficiently small it becomes the same as CP.

Walt: Actually, my main inspiration for the adventures are manga series, and in those there do are significant increases in power, however those are not necessarily linked to increasing skill levels.

Anyway, that said I don't disagree with with your analysis. In manga too, it is easy to disconcern who are the "adolscents" and who are the "adults". Although let me use a different terminology. Let me call them incompetent and competent respectively.

In these stories, the only actual growth of the competent comes when faced with situations where they are not competent. Where the situation for some reason are above their ability. In most stories the incompetent are usually guided by the competent so that the former can have chance to develop their potential. Whereas the incompetent's limits are yet to be established, the competent is more limited to the powers that character is known to have. The real improvments for the competent usually comes from external sources, like getting a magical sword or something. The incompetent however, might be able to simply whip up these unknown resources from within.

This might be exactly what you're saying too. I'm just rephrasing it from my understanding of it.

At first glance though, I'd wonder who'd want to play a competent as the character growth is so sure to be slow.

At second glance another thought strikes me: isn't this like AD&D after all? It's just that you let some characters start on a really high level and some start at level 1. The effect would be pretty much (let's say a couple of level 12's with a few level 1 characters) the same (except for the 'unknowns' in the level 1 character, which of course is different). The high leveled character won't improve significantly, the lower level characters will and there will be quick and definate improvements for them.

Or am I missing something?

James (damion): Sorry to have to point it out, but Luke is supposed to have trained a lot between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi.

As for the failure based advancement: Hmm.. interestingly enough I wrote something for the martial arts system which might be interesting. James pointed out that if I use a method where the most powerful and cool moves only can be used if the marginal success is good high enough, then when the characters really need it (as in fighting the boss) they won't be able to use it.

My immediate answer to that was: well maybe you could get an "Inpiration Roll". Like you see your friends getting hurt and that enrages you. So you can get one free roll for that. Just roll a Dx and add that to your marginal of success.

I was also going to introduce "Riskbreaking Roll" for my skills. Basically my skills are karma resolution (except for the 50-50 situation where you roll a 50-50). But what if you need to jump those 5 meters and you maximum in the system can jump 4 with that broken leg? I was thinking of a "Riskbreaking Roll" where you actually got a chance for it.

In addition you have Fate which also can get you to succeed in near impossible situations. I possibly could tie those together making a system where you increase in situations by doing the impossible and making things come out of nowhere.

But it doesn't seem easy. :-I

Back! With a little more detailed reply:

Mike wrote: But even radical systems like OTE, have such systems.

Mike wrote: I think what you want falls right into this usual category in terms of rationale. That is, requiring characters to have some sort of reasoning behind how they get the skills they do. The strenuousness with which you require this is a matter of aesthetics that only you can answer.

Mike wrote: But that said, what meta-game are you going to link to it? The Fate points? Won't those vary with use? Just dole one out with each package/level taken, and that takes care of itself.

Mike wrote: And there is the question of utility for using level to discern character power. This I disagree with for the most part. If I am a level 100 Accountant, I will probably have a much worse time with the dragon than the level 4 Warrior.

Walt wrote: - Few characters, in the fantasy literature that Ygg is intended to invoke the spirit of, "advance" in any significant way.

Walt wrote: - As Mike just laid out, adequate justification for advancement is rare in role playing games. The reason is simple. Realistic training for skill improvement, even off camera, is tedious and isn't any part of what you term "standard fantasy."

Walt wrote: Adults are fully accomplished in their abilities. (They may or may not have yet begun applying those abilities in any dramatic way -- that is, they may or may not yet have reputations or have already done heroic deeds.)

Walt wrote: Adolescents start out as "low level" characters and they advance. This advancement can be as dramatic as in D&D, but it's interpreted as the realization of their existing potential or the revealing of their natural gifts, which can eventually exceed those of the adult characters.

James wrote: You could always do a more 'meta' advancement also. Charachters get experiance, but they don't spend it on improving themseveles, but instead spend it on other things.
The advancement==connectedness comes to mind. An 'adult' might better equipment or a patron or a follower with their Fate points, rather than actually getting stronger or more skilled.

Walt wrote: I've so far failed to grasp Christoffer's vision for how he plans to give Ygg the distinctive feel he intends. It appears to me that he has so far failed to fully grasp the utility of system in helping to create such a distinctive feel (applying the System Does Matter postulate). But I could be wrong.

Walt wrote: 1. Character is about to fail at an ability, or confronts a test of an ability that appears beyond capability.

2. Character invokes applicable TRoS style SAs either to make a final greater effort, or (usually in the case of supernatural abilities) have an inspiration that suddenly makes the task seem doable.

3. If step #2 is successful, the action succeeds, AND the character will now perform that feat at a higher level of effectiveness in the future.

wfreitag wrote: Damion, I agree that some characters do advance in fantsay fiction. However, my point is that most of that advancement is associated with specific characters of specific types and is usually unrelated to realistic amounts of training or practice. Luke Skywalker is a perfect representative of what I called the "adolescent" character types who advance this way. (Note that "adolescent" is not intended to be a precise description of the character's actual age or temperament.) Obi-Wan "trains" Luke for at most a few hours or days aboard the Falcon (however long the flight to Alderaan is supposed to take). This has no similarity to spending months or seasons at a time in training, and doing so over and over again. Yoda's training of Luke is at most a few weeks (the time it takes for Vader to arrive at Cloud City after Han and Leia arrive, which doesn't seem to be more than a few days but I guess could be a little longer). And that training is unsuccessful. We know now that Jedi training is normally fifteen years or so. Luke isn't just a would-be Jedi, but also a certain type of fantasy protagonist. Those rules don't apply to him.

1)If pick-pockets is a defining charitaristic of the characther, they should complain to the GM that they havn't gotten to use it. Some like 'At least let me go to a town or something!'.

Other points: Losing a charitaristic may be ok, if it doesn't fit with that champaign. Unless the player really minds, it's not a problem. This is actually an advantage over level based systems, where effort is 'wasted' improving unused abilities. (A level improves everything, theoretically without that ability, you'd level faster.)

There are various sub issues here.
1)You mentioned that your much more likely to run into may things that need to be hit with a dagger than you there are pockets to be picked. Thus it should improve more 'per use' . It seems tough to select this though, and complicated, as you need an 'improvment spec' per skill.

2)In the setting you mentioned, it doesn't have that much utility. Adventurers aren't usually sent out to pick a pocket. It can be worked in so that it is usefull (pickpocket a guard for a key is the common one) but other than that it's a pretty selfish skill, a way for the thief to make pocket change. Also, most GM's don't want players aquiring unbounded amounts of money, so there won't be many opportunities, or if there are, they won't give you much money, so it's hardly worth it. This I think is a problem with having it as a skill. My point is that it's difficult for the player to 'proactivly use it.' The solution would be to eliminate it as a seperate skill and have it as a subset of a more general skill.

3)Minimum level of competince-A lot of skills have a minimum level to be usefull, becasue the penalty for failure is pretty bad. In the case of pickpocket, you get chased by the law. Thus the player may have difficulty using it starting out anyway. The GM can make low difficutly numbers for some things. Easy monsters make sense, but a lot of easily picked pockets seems weird. (Why didn't someone else get this guy already?). The solution would be to start the skill level pretty high.


4)It's also a 'solo skill'. Actually most thief skills have this problem. While the thief is sneaking around scouting or picking pockets, the other players sit there, as it effectivly splits the group. Not sure the solution here. I've considered group skills-i.e. a thief can bring a couple people through shadows with him. Not sure how to do it for pickpocket though.

Anyway: Possible solutions
1)As you said Chris, levels increase everything.

2)Not require a skill to be used to be improved, player can
improve it if they want. Then when it's needed, it's there. Also, the GM can wait till there is a good chance of success. This seems to lose versimilitude.

3)More general skills-I.e. a skill does many things, so doing one improves everything-again, you lose detail.

Hi,

I've just had the good fortune to find this site and have spent a good few minutes reading through this thread. Is it worth mentioning the GNS question here?

A gamist design would base improvement on superior performance in contrast to the other players (which ironically imbalances the system). This would mean kills, successful dice rolls, and all that.

A simulationist system may focus on training, a rookie becoming a veteran, an adolescent developing his natural and supernatural abilities, etc.

A narrative system would tie advancement to dramatically suitable points, a character who takes a challenge far greater than he was previously capable ofd, may find his abilities improve at said climactic moment. Alternatively, a narrative system may find it most appropriate to have no advancement or minimal advancement, unless you have the classic adolescent or rookie or unpolished prodigy character stories.

Perhaps the best way to decide on a system is to look at where you sit on good old GNS.

Pale Fire wrote:

Walt wrote: Adults are fully accomplished in their abilities. (They may or may not have yet begun applying those abilities in any dramatic way -- that is, they may or may not yet have reputations or have already done heroic deeds.)

Are these characters fun to play? Wouldn't it be similar to playing a level 20 character in AD&D fighting goblins or something? Also, so me a significant part of the enjoyment is actually improving skills and see the character explore its potential. Of course I could do an "adolescent" character if I like that. But are there people who would want to play "adults"? Really?

Just to answer your question, yes. I hate the improving skills thing. I like to play characers who are competent and develop emotion during a campaign, not skill bonuses.

Hi,

I've just had the good fortune to find this site and have spent a good few minutes reading through this thread. Is it worth mentioning the GNS question here?

A gamist design would base improvement on superior performance in contrast to the other players (which ironically imbalances the system). This would mean kills, successful dice rolls, and all that.

A simulationist system may focus on training, a rookie becoming a veteran, an adolescent developing his natural and supernatural abilities, etc.

A narrative system would tie advancement to dramatically suitable points, a character who takes a challenge far greater than he was previously capable ofd, may find his abilities improve at said climactic moment. Alternatively, a narrative system may find it most appropriate to have no advancement or minimal advancement, unless you have the classic adolescent or rookie or unpolished prodigy character stories.

Perhaps the best way to decide on a system is to look at where you sit on good old GNS.

The whole question of beginning character proficiency is one that, as GM, I generally vary from campaign to campaign, from player to player. F'rex, my current campaign is only a few months old -- and I plan on moving some 2000 miles in a few months. So I wanted to start the PCs as relatively experienced, and still keep advancement at the "normal rate" (which, in my game, is not all that fast).

This post has no real point, other than to point out that few/no game systems have a mechanical way of supporting this. For most game systems, it's just a matter of "everyone starts at 3rd level/with 200 points" -- but if you adopted the "start young with growth potential or mature with less growth potential", the GM would have a much harder time customizing the system to his needs.

Lee

Pale Fire wrote: It could be argued (as I'm doing now I guess) that many fantasy stories only represent a few rpg adventure session and so their advancement even within a rpg supportive of such things might be limited.

It could be interesting (feel free to PM me if that is more appropriate) of what you think Ygg is. I feel that recently I've done so much rethinking in terms of the system. It would surprise me if I haven't had any progress. However, most of those things are not solidly written down yet as I feel I have to work out some important things (like the levels we are discussing right now!) before I can assemble all of the new tools I've aquired into a new draft.

damion wrote: 1)If pick-pockets is a defining charitaristic of the characther, they should complain to the GM that they havn't gotten to use it. Some like 'At least let me go to a town or something!'.

2)Not require a skill to be used to be improved, player can
improve it if they want. Then when it's needed, it's there. Also, the GM can wait till there is a good chance of success. This seems to lose versimilitude.

3)More general skills-I.e. a skill does many things, so doing one improves everything-again, you lose detail.

I woul disagree. What if your character is very honorable? Do you complain to the GM that you haven't gotten a chance to play out his honor?

I woul disagree. What if your character is very honorable? Do you complain to the GM that you haven't gotten a chance to play out his honor?

Yes

contracycle wrote:

I woul disagree. What if your character is very honorable? Do you complain to the GM that you haven't gotten a chance to play out his honor?

Yes

Amazing Kreskin wrote: If you create a character with some sort of Honor score (whether attribute or trait or whatever), that is something that begs and screams to be tested/challenged/questioned in-game, and any GM who ignores it is missing out on a prime opportunity for some seriously cool roleplaying.

I can't really conceive of a simulationist solution to the problem of the "I want the play a knight even though I know full well knights don't fit in here" choice. If you're simulating a land where knights are comparitively useless, and you simulate a knight going in there, I think you have to simulate his lack of effectiveness. Either that, or you stop simulating altogether, and focus on story and "character protaganization" instead.

Sometimes, in real life, people find themselves in situations where they're ineffective. If you want to simulate everything that leads up to that ineffectiveness, you'll probably have to model it as well. No "solution" to that -- just a design decision.

Now you're catching on Jasper.

Extend this to a more general situation, where it's not "can't use", but "have very little use of it in adventure scenarios".

However, these skills ARE fleshing or helping to define the character. Even in the knight case they might catch a dragon they ride.. in one adventure. The problem is that if the knight gives up a lot of efficiency for such poor payback, won't he get stomped over by more efficient characters?

Yes.

Is that a good sim game to let that happen? I don't think so. So the problem restated: how do we let the knight develop his riding so that he keeps his flavour skill? And how do we prevent that flavour skill from costing the knight too much in character efficiency?

What if all characters have these meaningless skills? Well the problem arises in when some keep develop them and some care little for a consistent character but put priority in efficiency.

There seems to be little choice but to enforce increasing these skills or make them free to increase in some way.

That is why I'm pointing at D&D, because it is a good example of the former. The latter I haven't seen anywhere really. There are other examples than D&D for the former, like Palladium, but not as clear. Most sim games, however, simply ignores this problem.

You want to only make skills cost if they are useful? Only charge for them when they are used. Every time a player uses a skill, he must pay Points equal to the level of the skill or something like that.

This is the only equitable way to ensure that a character is balanced in play.

Mike

As has been pointed out in the other thread, this is a very broad and common problem, and really needs to be tackled for a specific set of mechanics -- there is no single solution.

Mike's suggestion is a pretty good one. Another solution is to go the route GURPS took with its Allies (as have many other games): you pay points not just based on the effectiveness of a particular ability, but also on the likelihood that it will come into play.

So in the knight example, if it's already been defined that we're not in a dragon-infested place, but that there's still some chance of a dragon attack, why don't I just pay, oh...maybe 1/5th the normal cost. You could keep a permanent record of this too, so that if the characters moved into a more dragon-filled region, the knight would need to pay some points (either that, or have the ability limited in some other fashion).


Oh, and one thing that may be confusing t he issue:

Pale Fire wrote: The problem is that if the knight gives up a lot of efficiency for such poor payback, won't he get stomped over by more efficient characters?

Yes.

Is that a good sim game to let that happen? I don't think so.

Does the GM (or the system itself) reliably know in advance, and in perpetuity, how useful a skill is going to be?

If the answer is no, then obviously no one knows how useful a skill will be. That means that there's no reliable way to distinguish a "useful" skill from a "color" skill, or pinpoint where along a continuum between the two a skill falls. In this situation only ex post facto solutions like Mike's (in which you pay for the skill only after you learn how useful it is in a unit of play) can guarantee that no skill will ever be too expensive or too cheap for its usefulness.

If the answer is yes, then the system or the GM can price skills accordingly. Skills that are not useful at all should be free, and can be assumed to be at as high an advancement level as the player desires. This covers e.g. the farming skills of the expert lifelong farmer who then goes to sea to seek adventure. Skills that are less useful should be cheaper in proportion. For example, it's been repeatedly pointed out that picking pockets is really very limited in usefulness in most fantasy settings. The picking pockets skill should therefore either be very cheap to acquire and advance, or start at a very high effectiveness, or both. The former portrays picking pockets as a sort of hobby skill not requiring a great deal of the character's effort to pursue; the latter, as a likely part of a character's background reflecting a childhood on the streets.

The other general point I want to make is that there can be a workable balance between generalization and specialization in skills. But the balance has to be realistically reflective of the actual play. If combat is 90% of play, then non-combat skills should be at least 90% cheaper than combat skills. (And that would be for a hypothetical skill that's always useful outside of combat. Most skills should be far cheaper than that!)

AD&D was deliberately designed to strongly encourage specialization over generalization. Characters who tried to generalize (either by multi-classing or by choosing a more generalized class) were hosed. The choice was you could be 100% effective in one major area, or maybe 25% effective in each of two major areas, and so forth. Much of the cause of this was in subtle cumulative mathematical effects. Effectiveness in combat comes down to how often you attack, times how frequently you hit, times how much damage you do, times how long you can remain in combat before running out of hit points. Do the math. If a non combat-specialist (say, a thief) is 60% as effective as a specialist of the same experience level in each of these individual areas, he's really only 13% as effective in combat overall! (Factor in his back-stab advantage, and he's still thoroughly hosed.) If you decide that the usefulness of a thief's special skills are a fair trade for being, say, 80% as effective in general combat as an equally experienced combat specialist, then the thief still has to have about 95% as many attacks, 95% as high a chance to hit, do 95% as much damage, and resist 95% as much punishment as the specialist in order to reach that 80% overall. AD&D is chock full of these kind of double- triple- and quadruple-whammies.

This effect, I believe, has exaggerated the apparent intractability of the problem of min-maxing because in many systems the effectiveness penalty for not min-maxing is actually considerably higher than is generally appreciated. It's not a matter of (most) players being willing to trade off everything else for a tiny effectiveness edge. The advantage from min-maxing is often enormous. Give players more reasonable trade-offs that are truly worth the cost and you'll see more reasonable behavior.

And yes, this is plunging deep into "currency issues" which you set out trying to avoid. You can't, if you want to take the general approach you've started out on. Currency issues are fundamental in this type of design. You can avoid looking at them but that won't make them go away.

- Walt

A knight with no horse? A pickpocket in a dungeon?

It seems to me these people may begin the game less effective compared to their born and bred dungeon hacking couterparts, but won't they learn the new situation better.

The only way to determine a useless skill is in play, and maybe that is where it should be remedied. Perhaps characters with unused skills should be rewarded at experience time.

Maybe for every skill not used or under-used, the character gets bonus to skills that were used. Or a percentage chance of developing an alternative useful skill. Our poor unfortunate knight would develop some dungeon hacking skills (low light eyes, cave stealth, whatever) for free. The dwarven fighter (used to the environment) would get no freebies, unless the campaign moves in the wilderness, and he would develop new skills quickly.

First, an aside: any DM worth his salt knows that the pick-pockets skill in D&D covers a lot more than picking pockets. Certainly it's more useful in an urban setting, where you can steal objects off tables in a bazaar (as Aladin gives the merchant his own apple to pay for the apple taken) or do standard shoplifting in stores. It's also about stealing objects from someone's guarded treasure horde. The pick pockets skill is about the ability to stealthily steal something; it's not about targeting marks in airports or something. If the important papers are on the desk when you confront the villain in his office, it is the thief who notices and surreptitiously replaces them with some envelopes that were in the trash can. It is a more useful skill than has been recognized in this thread.

However, the objection overall is well taken.

One of the confusions I see here is the distinction between useful and useless skills, when what we're really discussing is the difference between character-defining and character empowering skills. And perhaps if we recognize that this is the problem, and not the other, we can take an unusual step toward the answer. Create two classes of skills, and two classes of points. One class of skills would be all those things that everyone has to take--combat abilities, mostly, but there might be other things here. The other class would be those skills which define a character but don't make him particularly more potent in most combat situations. The trick would be that since you had independent point pools, you could not spend the points which were given for these character-defining skills on combat skills anyway, so you are not disadvantaged by not doing so. Thus the thief has as many points to spend on combat skills as the fighter, but he has points he can only spend on other skills, and these will most likely go into those areas in which he specializes.

One of the snags would be finding skills for the fighter that don't actually improve his combat abilities; otherwise the character-defining skills pool is defeated because everyone will once again go for those. Riding, maintaining weapons and armor, fletching arrows, tracking enemies, and perhaps some others would work well here.

And to do something entirely counter-intuitive which would have the effect of encouraging specialization, make the initial level of any skill cost the most, with succeeding levels costing less. Thus the character who began with pick pockets and pick locks as initial skills could improve both of them, or pay more to take something else.

It's a rough idea, but maybe you can make something of it.

--M. J. Young

Walt, I believe your analysis is correct regarding currency issues. But is there some way to simplify things without entirely changing the whole game?

I believe I took one step towards simplification by declaring all characters "fighters" more or less.

Another was by trying to follow the suggestion to make every type of weapon choice equal on the average but that's another story.

What I'm trying to make for Ygg is to make characters equal in combat ability and then let the particular expression of it change.

Obviously some versions might be more advantageous than others - if you know unarmed combat you fight equally good without weapons for example, or if you are great with the bow you can hit someone from a distance.

The overall efficiency should be the same. That's the attempt anyway. You should be able to make this really cool and quirky character and have just as much to do in combat situations as the others.

Maybe others here are wondering why I focus on combat so much. Well, the whole point is that the characters are heroes helping people against danger. That usually (although not necessarily) involves fighting bad things at some point. What defines them as heroes is partly this ability to stand against the evil forces.

Well, then combat effectiveness should be an attribute universal to all characters. The detail lies in skills, but base effectiveness is universal.

contracycle wrote: Well, then combat effectiveness should be an attribute universal to all characters. The detail lies in skills, but base effectiveness is universal.

Pale Fire wrote:
However, enter magic and unarmed combat. They both drive up the efficiency of certain types of professions.

I like MJs idea in this circumstance. A divided pool seems to be right up your alley in this case. It means that everyone will develop in the "important" skills, which will infom them about the important-ness of combat. And everypne will develop in less important skills as well, thus differentiating the characters. As Ralph pointed out, this is exactly what TROS already does (skills/proficiencies).

Note, however, that this does not solve the problem of Protagonism. All characters in this game will be protagonized similarly by their ability to fight, etc. In superhero games, this is solved by specialization in types of fighting. One character is a brick, another an energy projector, another a martial artist. In Ygg, it would seem that you have parallels in specializing in Fighting, Magic, and Martial Arts, etc.

In practice, and IME, this works so-so for creating protagonism. Beware the player who trys to make the Fighter/MagicUser/Martial Artist character, however. If he has to split points between all three, he will be dwarfed by any character who specializes. If he is not forced to split, then everyone will play this character.

Mike

Well, balancing effectivness is difficult.
Say you equate combat effectivness to damage, then you have an equation like this

Damage Given=(# targets/attack)*(Damage/attack-target)*(frequency of attacks)*(chance to hit/attack).
All this is divided by Damage Take
Damage Taken=(chance to be hit)*(frequency of being attacked)*({damage/attack}-possibly minus a reduction)
Your combat effectiveness is Damage Given/Damage Taken. You want this to be big. Flip to avoid div by zero.
Then you equalize this for all professions. Now you've equalized combat, but now since everyone is equal in combat, imbalances in other area's show up. Magic generally has non-combat usefullness, so does pick pocketing. Martial artists can't be disarmed, always have a weapon, can bring it to parties, ect. However, if the primary focus is combat, and everyone is equal there, well, minor disadvantages in other places may not matter. This is the point where the GM can try to make use of color skills, to keep everyone protagonised.

A divided combat-noncombat pool makes sense to me too in this context.

Some decisions would have to be made concerning combat-applicable magic. Do spellcasters use their entire combat pool on nonmagical combat ability, then add combat magic on top of that from their noncombat pool? That seems to give the spellcasters a combat edge and defeat the purpose of dividing the pools. But if combat magic comes from the combat pool, the possibility of specialist spellcasters with little or no melee ability arises.

This is partially, though not completely, resolved if magic is generally less effective in combat than just attacking with a weapon. (The magic would be very useful anyway, for special tactical situations such as exploiting vulnerabilities or targeting someone in the back ranks or attacking when weaponless, but it wouldn't be a perpetual advantage.) However, this might not be good from a pure "color" point of view, if the expectation is that magic should be powerful as well as impressive.

As for damion's effectiveness equation, there are many different valid ways of looking at this. I tend to use total damage given for as long as you can remain effective, rather than damage given per damage taken. That means including total damage that can be taken (before having to withdraw from combat or being put out of action) as another multiplicative term in the numerator.

- Walt

contracycle wrote: Do they? A martial artists who is never disarmed never gets to use their martial arts ability - hence it is mere colour exactly like thieving skills.

Mike wrote: In superhero games, this is solved by specialization in types of fighting. One character is a brick, another an energy projector, another a martial artist. In Ygg, it would seem that you have parallels in specializing in Fighting, Magic, and Martial Arts, etc.

Ok my first point to be picky (yes picky my apologies but I must.) Technically any order fighting technique IS a martial art. Most of the traditional Oriental MArtial Arts that we mean when we use the MA term, have weapon techniques in them and a few are all about Weapons techniques. (Forgive my broadness as I am not expert by any stretch) This being the case, Fencing is a martial art, dagger fighting, garroting someone, etc... So what you have in Ygg are students, formally or informally, of various schools of martial arts thought, even if there is no formal "school."

I also am a little vague on the idea, as I am seeing it anyway, of equality in combat, especially if every one "fights". Even in a game about fighters they will not all be equal, different stats, different skill choices. I aplogise if you have gone over that portion before, and I just missed it...

I do not like the split skill resolution idea despite many of the good arguments in favor of it. It breaks characters down, gives them a dual personality. It also is forcing them to put experience in color and fluff skills, OR put their time into combat which they may not want to do. Essentially it says "In the given time period, you MUST spend x% on learning to fight and x% on your leisure or occupationa skills". Unless they are all in a military or psuedo-military organization then this really does not make realistic sense.

Unless of course there were no points for combat skills. Essentially at each step progression you gained +1 (for want of a better number) in your combat skills and possibly were allowed to learn one new skill.
That might be one solution.

Just My 2 Lunars

SMH
ADGBoss

ADGBoss wrote: I also am a little vague on the idea, as I am seeing it anyway, of equality in combat, especially if every one "fights". Even in a game about fighters they will not all be equal, different stats, different skill choices. I aplogise if you have gone over that portion before, and I just missed it...